Fireworks Billboards

So if you drive down I-95, you can see a lot of billboards, right?

Everybody knows that. Billboards are to Florida as fleas are to dogs. It’s just one of those daily annoyances that, after a while, you almost don’t even notice anymore.

But there’s a couple of them in particular that draw my interest whenever I see them.

Sky King fireworks	........	and Phantom fireworks.

Get a gander at them two, ok?

Notice, if you will, that they’ve both got guys on ‘em, perhaps to assist you in deciding which one that you’ll be patronizing when it comes time to blow things up, or maybe just set them dramatically on fire.

Sky King, looks to be a real happy-go-lucky kinda guy. Probably likes to vacation in Vegas. Drives a Corvette, natch. Fancies himself quite the lothario with the women. Probably drinks a little more than he should, but for the most part he’s a harmless enough sort, despite being an idiot.

Which brings us to the business of: How much, exactly, do these sorts of things in advertisements actually have to do with who walks in the door, and who doesn’t?

Are all the guys at Sky King half looped on cheap scotch, with a bleach-blonde floozy in the passenger seat of the ‘vette that’s sitting out front?

Are all the guys at Phantom creepy-looking weirdos with skin that’s too white who don’t talk to you?

And if so, why?

Are we all that lemming-like?

Do the proprietors of the fireworks stores actively seek out just a certain type of person to buy their wares?

Considering that the wares which the proprietors of these businesses purvey, can, and do, blow fingers and hands right off of their occasionally unfortunate patrons, what may we infer about the private thoughts of the folks who own and operate these places?

I dunno.

And of course, the fact that people are allowed to sell things that can maim the purchasers of those things, brings up an interesting issue or two as well.

Used to be, any kind of firework was illegal in Florida, but that’s obviously no longer the case.

Shall we celebrate this small addition to our list of liberties in a time of otherwise shrinking liberties?

Or should we seek to stamp this pernicious activity out, wherever we encounter it?

Do we really care enough about either Sky King or Phantom to really bother with curtailing their liberties?

If the world was run by insurance companies, I’m pretty sure that gunpowder would be nothing more than a fading memory in men’s minds by now.

But let’s face it, to what degree do you think that an insurance company is fit to dictate terms to you about your life?

And, now that they’ve recently discovered that the overall lifetime health-care costs associated with obese people are actually lower, because these folks routinely die off sooner than the rest of us, does that mean we’re going to be handed an increasingly lengthy list of personal liberties to indulge in from now on, in the hopes that we'll die off sooner too?

I had no idea of the trouble I was going to get into just by pondering a couple of billboards on the side of the highway.

Maybe I shouldn’t go looking at things too closely anymore.

Or maybe we should abolish billboards.

Or maybe not.